Now that I think about it, decline of mass Shakespeare/Bible literacy has probably helped give rise to the current wave of vague, aphoristic titles for NYT bestseller litfic ("All the light we cannot see," "When we cease to understand the world" and stuff like that). If they won't know the difference, why bother i guess.
For some reason I've always been drawn to (full form only) The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade.
Yes, I thought about mentioning On Earth We We Couldn't Hold All the Beautiful Light of the Stars That Heaven Bears etc. etc., but I didn't want to be unpleasant. You could still quote the Bible or Shakespeare without people noticing, but then "you" would have to read them! Agreed on the Melville, probably his best title overall.
I wasn’t sure if my Goodreads reviews were public or not, apologies for being a cheeky little gremlin lol. I can only echo what that other reader said on Tumblr last week that I’m really grateful for your intellectual generosity by putting so much accessible writing about academic topics out here.
Looking forward to getting around to reading Major Arcana, I’ll report back once I’ve figured out how it relates to Dune so you can have an angle towards getting that Grimes bump.
No problem, I thought they were very fun! I started writing Major Arcana not that long after reading Dune for the first time, so there should be something there to work with.
Look at it this way, you seem to have an actual zoomer (I’d surmise) reviewing your stuff now! I’m not too familiar with Gray, but the way you describe him in those reviews seems like an update to the classic Voegelin/Rieff/Kristol(Irving, rather than Bill) school of more-or-less nihilist conservatism, atheist priests running around desperately trying to shore up the collapsing edifice of a sacred order even they no longer believe in as anything more than mechanical necessity. I love that stuff, even if I find it mostly unconvincing as moral philosophy (if there really is just a zero at the center of all things, why continue to follow the received wisdom? Couldn’t better ways be discovered?) but I’d share the apprehension about putting it on a similar list.
It's funny, I don't love it (what I love is raving utopian lunacy as in Emerson and Nietzsche), I just think it might be more correct. "Better ways" can be discovered, but slowly, slowly...
David Rieff, BTW, is a big Gray fan. I think he's still welcome in the leftish press because of how hard he went against the neocons in the Bush-Blair years, and because he's an anti-capitalist, though he started out as a Thatcherite. His books tend to run together, being variations on a theme, but you can't go wrong with Straw Dogs, surely one of the better books of the 21st century whether one "agrees" or not.
I am cautiously optimistic that Zoomers (like X-ers) get me more than my fellow Millennials or my parental Boomers do.
Yeah it’s an appealing worldview in some ways-I’m not quite romantic enough about the worldview of pre-modern monotheism to sustain it, but I get that yearning for an intellectual-cultural wholeness, even if I also suspect the fall is something in human cognition, and not something that happens in time. Not always sure what I think of David Rieff beside that I can’t imagine having either of his parents separately, never mind dealing with the foibles of both at once. I think there are things in your books that are generation-specific, like the melancholic sense of loss you mentioned a while back, but in other ways I’d be inclined to agree (although I belong to one of those tiny in between cohorts that doesn’t quite fit in with anybody, so take that with a grain of salt!)
Agreed on the fall, hence my rejection of "primitive" or primordial art as categories. Homer, like Borges, was an aesthetic nihilist conservative!
This will sound whatever, but I'm always slightly worried about Rieff reading my stuff (his Twitter circle overlaps with my [modest!] group of admirers among the literati), considering how opinionated I am about his mother. I haven't had the pleasure of reading Philip yet, but have put The Triumph of the Therapeutic on the short list.
I think that’s totally fair, I’ve always found it a little terrifying to be noticed by people related to my writing-even the ones I mostly agree with! I look forward to seeing your thoughts on Triumph. Ex-husband and wife have this strange not quite parallel path where she goes from full cancer of the Earth radicalism to “liberal imperialist” rapprochement with bourgeois life, while he spends his entire life refining and growing more austere in the thesis they laid down together at the end of that first book, coming almost to view modernity itself as terminally ill, consumed by deathwork.
Now that I think about it, decline of mass Shakespeare/Bible literacy has probably helped give rise to the current wave of vague, aphoristic titles for NYT bestseller litfic ("All the light we cannot see," "When we cease to understand the world" and stuff like that). If they won't know the difference, why bother i guess.
For some reason I've always been drawn to (full form only) The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade.
Yes, I thought about mentioning On Earth We We Couldn't Hold All the Beautiful Light of the Stars That Heaven Bears etc. etc., but I didn't want to be unpleasant. You could still quote the Bible or Shakespeare without people noticing, but then "you" would have to read them! Agreed on the Melville, probably his best title overall.
I wasn’t sure if my Goodreads reviews were public or not, apologies for being a cheeky little gremlin lol. I can only echo what that other reader said on Tumblr last week that I’m really grateful for your intellectual generosity by putting so much accessible writing about academic topics out here.
Looking forward to getting around to reading Major Arcana, I’ll report back once I’ve figured out how it relates to Dune so you can have an angle towards getting that Grimes bump.
No problem, I thought they were very fun! I started writing Major Arcana not that long after reading Dune for the first time, so there should be something there to work with.
Look at it this way, you seem to have an actual zoomer (I’d surmise) reviewing your stuff now! I’m not too familiar with Gray, but the way you describe him in those reviews seems like an update to the classic Voegelin/Rieff/Kristol(Irving, rather than Bill) school of more-or-less nihilist conservatism, atheist priests running around desperately trying to shore up the collapsing edifice of a sacred order even they no longer believe in as anything more than mechanical necessity. I love that stuff, even if I find it mostly unconvincing as moral philosophy (if there really is just a zero at the center of all things, why continue to follow the received wisdom? Couldn’t better ways be discovered?) but I’d share the apprehension about putting it on a similar list.
It's funny, I don't love it (what I love is raving utopian lunacy as in Emerson and Nietzsche), I just think it might be more correct. "Better ways" can be discovered, but slowly, slowly...
David Rieff, BTW, is a big Gray fan. I think he's still welcome in the leftish press because of how hard he went against the neocons in the Bush-Blair years, and because he's an anti-capitalist, though he started out as a Thatcherite. His books tend to run together, being variations on a theme, but you can't go wrong with Straw Dogs, surely one of the better books of the 21st century whether one "agrees" or not.
I am cautiously optimistic that Zoomers (like X-ers) get me more than my fellow Millennials or my parental Boomers do.
Yeah it’s an appealing worldview in some ways-I’m not quite romantic enough about the worldview of pre-modern monotheism to sustain it, but I get that yearning for an intellectual-cultural wholeness, even if I also suspect the fall is something in human cognition, and not something that happens in time. Not always sure what I think of David Rieff beside that I can’t imagine having either of his parents separately, never mind dealing with the foibles of both at once. I think there are things in your books that are generation-specific, like the melancholic sense of loss you mentioned a while back, but in other ways I’d be inclined to agree (although I belong to one of those tiny in between cohorts that doesn’t quite fit in with anybody, so take that with a grain of salt!)
Agreed on the fall, hence my rejection of "primitive" or primordial art as categories. Homer, like Borges, was an aesthetic nihilist conservative!
This will sound whatever, but I'm always slightly worried about Rieff reading my stuff (his Twitter circle overlaps with my [modest!] group of admirers among the literati), considering how opinionated I am about his mother. I haven't had the pleasure of reading Philip yet, but have put The Triumph of the Therapeutic on the short list.
I think that’s totally fair, I’ve always found it a little terrifying to be noticed by people related to my writing-even the ones I mostly agree with! I look forward to seeing your thoughts on Triumph. Ex-husband and wife have this strange not quite parallel path where she goes from full cancer of the Earth radicalism to “liberal imperialist” rapprochement with bourgeois life, while he spends his entire life refining and growing more austere in the thesis they laid down together at the end of that first book, coming almost to view modernity itself as terminally ill, consumed by deathwork.